Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Third Edition

H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y

Ancient, Medieval, & Modern

ERNST BREISACH

Third Edition

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1983, 1994, 2007 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. First edition published 1983.

Second edition published 1994. Third edition published 2007.

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07282-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07283-8 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-07282-7 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-07283-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07284-5 (electronic)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Breisach, Ernst.

Historiography : ancient, medieval, and modern / Ernst Breisach.—3rd ed.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07282-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-07282-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07283-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-07283-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Historiography. I. Title.

D13.B686 2007

907.2—dc22

2007010112

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Ad Hermam

uxorem et sociam

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1

The Emergence of Greek Historiography

The Timeless Past of Gods and Heroes

Discovering a Past of Human Dimensions

2

The Era of the Polis and Its Historians

The New History of the Polis

The Decline of the Polis: The Loss of Focus

3

Reaching the Limits of Greek Historiography

The History of a Special Decade

Hellenistic Historiography: Beyond the Confines of the Polis

The Problem of New Regions and People

4

Early Roman Historiography

Myths, Greeks, and the Republic

An Early Past Dimly Perceived

The Roman Past and Greek Learning

Greco-Roman History Writing: Triumph and a Latin Response

5

Historians and the Republic’s Crisis

History as Inspiration and Structural Analysis

History Divorced from Rome’s Fate

6

Perceptions of the Past in Augustan and Imperial Rome

History Writing in the New Rome of Augustus

Historians and the Empire

7

The Christian Historiographical Revolution

The Formulation of Early Christian Historiography

The Problem of Continuity in an Age of Upheaval

The Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon Consolidation in Historiography

8

The Historiographical Mastery of New Peoples, States, and Dynasties

Integrating Peoples into Latin Historiography

Legitimizing New States and Dynasties

9

Historians and the Ideal of the Christian Commonwealth

The Last Synthesis of Empire and Christianity

The Persistence of Christian Themes

Histories of a Grand and Holy Venture: The Crusades

10

Historiography’s Adjustment to Accelerating Change

The Search for Developmental Patterns

Transformations of the Chronicle

11

Two Turning Points

The Renaissance and The Reformation

The Italian Renaissance Historians

Humanist Revisionism Outside of Italy

The Collapse of Spiritual Unity

12

The Continuing Modification of Traditional Historiography

The Blending of Theoretical and Patriotic Answers

Universal History: A Troubled Tradition

Historians, the New Politics, and New Perceptions of the World

The Origin and Early Forms of American History

13

The Eighteenth-Century Quest for a New Historiography

The Reassessment of Historical Order and Truth

New Views on Historical Truth

New Grand Interpretations: Progress in History

New Grand Interpretations: The Cyclical Pattern

14

Three National Responses

The British Blend of Erudition, Elegance, and Empiricism

Enlightenment Historiography in a German Key

Recording the Birth of the American Nation

15

Historians as Interpreters of Progress and Nation—I

German Historians: The Causes of Truth and National Unity

France: Historians, the Nation, and Liberty

16

Historians as Interpreters of Progress and Nation—II

English Historiography in the Age of Revolution

Historians and the Building of the American Nation

Historiography’s Golden Age

17

A First Prefatory Note to Modern Historiography (1860—1914)

18

History and the Quest for a Uniform Science

Comte’s Call to Arms and the Response

The German and English Responses to Positivist Challenges

The Peculiar American Synthesis

19

The Discovery of Economic Dynamics

An Economic Perspective on the Past

Karl Marx: Paneconomic Historiography

Economic History after Marx

20

Historians Encounter the Masses

Jubilant and Dark Visions

Social History as Institutional History

The American New History: Call for a Democratic History

21

The Problem of World History

22

Historiography Between Two World Wars (1918—39)

The Twentieth-Century Context

Challenges to Historians

Historicism: From Dominance to Crisis

Historians and the War Guilt Debate

23

History Writing in Liberal Democracies (1918—39)

American Historiography after the Great War

American Progressive History

Other Social Histories

England: Historiography in a Fading Empire

French Historians: The Revolutionary Tradition and a New Vision of the Past

24

Historiography and the Grand Ideologies

Italian Fascism and Historiography (1922—43)

German Historians in the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s Reich

The Soviet Union: The Imagined Future as the Guide for History

25

American Historiography after 1945

New Realities and Traditional Horizons

Historiographical Repercussions of America’s New Status

Historiography as Call for Reform

26

History in the Scientific Mode

History in the Language of Numbers

Reshaping Economic History

Growing Dissent: Narrativism

Psychohistory: Promise and Problems

27

Transformations in English and French Historiography

Voices in the War Guilt Debate

History Writing in Post-Imperial England

Traditional and New French Historical Perspectives

28

Marxist Historiography in the Soviet Union

and Western Democracies

The Problems and the End of the Soviet Union’s Marxism

Marxist Historical Theory in the West

29

Historiography in the Aftermath of Fascism

Historical Perspectives in Postwar Italy

History for and of a New Germany

30

World History Between Vision and Reality

The Multiple Cultures Model

Progress and Westernization

World System Theories

31

Recent Historiography: Fundamental Challenges and Their Aftermath

The Maturation of the New History

History and Two Visions of Postmodernity

The New Cultural History

Prospects

Notes

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index of Persons and Anonymous Works

Index of Subjects

PREFACE

This book is not the result of a spur-of-the-moment decision or of its author’s wish to ride a wave of fashion. Rather it grew over many years together with my fascination with historiographical problems. Again and again I confronted the question, Why has Western culture so persistently exhibited a concern for the past and produced so great a variety of historiographical interpretations? The expectation I held as a youthful historian, that I could find clear and ready answers, has long since yielded to a sense of awe for the complexity of the problem and the perplexing if not embarrassing realization that history, the discipline identified with reflection on the past, has no satisfactory account of its own career in English or any other language. In tranquil times that might not matter, although it seems hardly proper even then. But in the late twentieth century, when there is much talk about a crisis of historiography and when historians attempt to construct theories of history in order to justify the discipline and defend its territory, the lack of a comprehensive survey of historiography is more than an annoyance. It leads even historians to make ad hoc judgments on the nature and theory of history which—irony of ironies—fail to understand the problems of historiography historically.

There exist excellent monographs on aspects and periods of historiography. They are most valuable but cannot substitute for a continuous account. Only in the context of the whole of Western historiography’s development can we truly fathom the role and nature of history as a human endeavor. The desire to demonstrate that whole made me stubbornly stress the main lines of development and reject the temptation to write a handbook or encyclopedia with the obligation inherent in such works to mention as many worthy historians and their works as possible. Neither did I, nor could I, trace all the influences and cross-influences exhaustively; a work of many volumes would have resulted and, in Sir Walter Raleigh’s words, I fear that the darkness of age and death would have covered it and me, long before the performance.

The present work, which shows the role history and historians have played in the various societies and phases of Western culture, proved substantially more difficult to write than a Who wrote what, when book. The latter would demand much time and patience but little sense of development or interpretation. Readers who fail to find expected names and works here should remember that this book is designed to narrate and interpret, not to recite lists. Omission signifies not a lack of distinction but only that the historian or the work was not needed to illustrate a development or the thought of a school. Readers will also notice that I have avoided judgments on historians and schools of thought. I entrust these judgments to the readers and to life. The former will wish for that freedom and the latter has its own ways of judging—harsh, relentless, and final. And if some modern historians have entered the story of historiography through achievements of a lesser magnitude than those of Thucydides, Tacitus, or Gibbon it is precisely because life’s judgment on their worthiness is still outstanding. Finally, those who would have preferred a topical to a narrative account will find sufficient guidance in the detailed Table of Contents and the Index. As for dates, I have included many but relied in other instances on the context of narration to fix the time of a historiographical development. In addition, the life spans of the authors discussed are given in the Index.

My own expectations for this book are well measured. If the work will make discussions on the nature of history a bit more informed, help define the dimensions of the so-called crisis of history in a more realistic manner, kindle enthusiasm or simply respect for the discipline, and even lead some to read more in the works of past historians, its purpose will have been fulfilled and the many years of labor on it well spent.

At the beginning of all acknowledgments must stand the general and sincere one to the dozens of scholars who have written monographs on special periods and without whose labor my own would have been prolonged by many years. The select bibliography is in this sense also part of the acknowledgments. There were others who assisted me more directly in various ways: Eric Cochrane of the University of Chicago and Richard Mitchell of the University of Illinois, who critically reviewed some sections; colleagues at Western Michigan University, particularly Alan Brown, Albert Castel, Edward O. Elsasser, Robert Hahn, Paul Maier, Howard Mowen, and Dale Pattison, who helped me in many ways; Elizabeth White, who rendered editorial help; officials of Western Michigan University, who granted me two professional leaves; Opal Ellis and Becky Ryder, who patiently typed and retyped. My expression of gratefulness to them is no mere formality but the result of sincere appreciation.

INTRODUCTION

During the nineteenth century—often called the Golden Age of History—historians counseled kings, were leaders in the unification of Germany and Italy, gave a prime minister and a president to France, provided identities to new and old nations, inspired the young American nation in its mastery of a continent, endowed revolutions with the authority of the past, and ascended to the rank of scientists. Above all, they convinced most scholars that everything must be understood in terms of development; in short, historically. No wonder that Thomas Carlyle proclaimed history to be immortal: Some nations have prophecy, some have not: but of all mankind, there is no tribe so rude that it has not attempted History.¹

Today many smile not just about Carlyle’s quaint language, but also about his cocksure confidence. Living in this skeptical age they miss in the passage a proper measure of doubt and caution, if not a share of their suspicion that history has become a bit old-fashioned. Had not the historians of the nineteenth century proclaimed that everybody and everything changes and that there are no timeless concepts? Could it be then that history’s days have faded with those of the nineteenth century? Our age, these skeptics argue, may simply require new methods for and new approaches to the final explanation of human life or, as some would put it, new intellectual instruments for mastering the world; a world in which it no longer suffices to observe how things had gradually come to be, as traditional historians have been doing, but one in which historians have to be content with unearthing the raw materials for the social scientists who alone explain, maybe even reorder, human life in a scientific manner. More recently, others have exhorted historians to realize that the aim to reconstruct the past in its actuality—even imperfectly—was an illusion altogether. History was a special type of literature. Hence literary criticism and theory were the proper models of explanation.

Historians have reacted to such skepticism with bewilderment and, sometimes, with indignation. But in a world fond of new theories of history with either scientific or literary preferences, they have been increasingly drawn into theoretical discussions. When pressed to answer the query Why history? historians have fallen back on the long-standing defenses of history as a teacher of moral or practical lessons, an object of nostalgia, a justification for either old or new regimes, a gratification of human curiosity, a witness to God’s power, and, of course, a science of its own kind. The history of historiography has shown the role these uses of history have played, mostly in combinations. Yet their pragmatic functions have pointed to a more basic insight. The claim of history to be perennial cannot be based on a limited list of functions; it can only be sustained by demonstrating the existence of a necessary link between history, as reflection on the past, and human life.

An examination of the list of functions history has performed over the centuries reveals that these functions stem from the central fact that human life is subject to the dictates of time. At this point it is best to refrain from asking what time is unless one wishes to share in the exasperation of an ancient questioner: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not (St. Augustine). Psychologists, whose love for experiments and expressing results in numbers provides them with proper contemporary credentials, have in their way reaffirmed that the dimension of time is central to all of human existence. They have found that the span of time which we actually experience as now, the mental present, is only a fraction of a second long. It does not matter that in everyday life we mean a longer time span when we refer to the present, the conclusion is inescapable that human life is never simply lived in the present alone but rather in three worlds: one that is, one that was, and one that will be (or better, that people envisioned to be). In theory we know these three worlds as separate concepts but we experience them as inextricably linked and as influencing each other in many ways. Every important new discovery about the past changes how we think about the present and what we expect of the future; on the other hand every change in the conditions of the present and in the expectations for the future revises our perception of the past. That linkage constitutes a nexus in life and hence in the historical study of life. One that is best called the historical nexus. Historians of historiography have discerned the historical nexuses people of the past have shaped in their lives as they have tried to make sense of the human condition—a condition marked by the full dimension of time, that is, change and continuity alike. The nexuses, with their concrete manifestations of change and continuity, have always testified to the unbreakable connection between life and historical thought.

Some readers may well consider such pondering on history to be one of those strange flowers from the philosopher’s garden. Not at all; the existence of an inescapable link between past, present, and future, which destroys history’s image as an activity resembling idle rummaging in a bag of dry leaves and makes it into an activity necessary for human life, is experienced in daily life by everybody. There we observe how expectations for the future turn first into the realities of the present and then become the memories of the past—whether it be the fading of day into night, the change of seasons, the rise and fall of governments and states, or our own maturing and aging. They all testify to the continuous flow of time, although at a first look they accentuate the phenomenon of change. However, if we were to conclude that change is the only fundamental aspect of human life we would err seriously. Histories of seemingly unconnected changes, even if they were brilliantly written, would affect the reader like a thousand-hour-long look through a kaleidoscope; at first the observer is gripped by a fascination with the ever-changing patterns, then by increasing boredom, and finally by a deep sense of futility. History cannot for long remain the record of changes alone because that would deny the true nature of human life in which the experience of change is counterbalanced by that of continuity. Individuals and groups have long since discovered that even in the aftermath of the most radical revolutions the new age still carries many marks of the past. This continuity displeases advocates of sudden and complete change but contributes to human life a sense of stability, security, and even comfort. Once we accept that human life is marked both by change as that which makes past, present, and future different from each other and continuity as that which links them together, we begin to understand why historians have played so central a role in Western civilization. They have designed the great reconciliations between past, present, and future, always cognizant of both change and continuity. In other words, they have made sense of or, as some would put it, have given meaning to human life without denying its development throughout time. This link between life and historiography also explains why in generation after generation and in society after society historians have created ever new interpretations of the past. Those who use these changing views of the past for proving that historical truth is unreliable ignore the fact that it is life which goes on creating the ever different worlds—not quite new, but also not quite the same—to which historians must respond. All other branches of scholarship dealing with human life have so far shared in this failure to bring forth the unchanging truth, although many of them have claimed timelessness for their theories and insights.

The task of historians of historiography then does not seem too difficult to describe; it is to trace the ways in which people in Western culture have reflected on the past and what these reflections have told them about human life as it passes continuously from past to present to future. But time is not a type of space in which things happen, but it rather is interwoven into all aspects of life at any given moment. It introduces a tension into human existence between inescapable change and the human need for continuity. All of that happens in awareness of the unalterable linearity of individual and collective lives.

Historical accounts tell of the events and thoughts of people in the past—all of them marked by the historical nexuses that guided these people. Historians of historiography record how life tested and modified these nexuses often in dramatic fashions. But how should historians of historiography relate that seemingly wave-like development, ever rising and falling? They could simply compile an inventory of past historical views, perhaps even produce an encyclopedia of historiography. But that would deny the assertion by historians that chronological sequence is crucially important. Yet it would settle little if one arranged narrative portraits of historians and their views chronologically, as pictures are arranged in a gallery along a corridor. It still would leave unresolved the all-important question whether there is more to historiographical development than a record of historiographical views that reflect merely the idiosyncratic attitudes of period after period. The life experiences and insights gained in these periods would become invalid outside of their settings. Even modern historical science would be peculiar just to our period and have no special claim to universal validity. These arrangers have discerned no inherent direction in historiography or indeed in life itself.

In contrast, other historians of historiography have given preference to those historians whose views have presumably helped guide historiographical development toward a clear and known goal. By far the best known and presently most influential version of this view has equated the story of historiography with the emergence of the modern historical science. In their accounts these historians of historiography sort the wheat from the chaff, that is, they separate in all of past historiography those views which have contributed to the forming of the modern science of history from those which were based on wrong perceptions; the former earn praise, the latter reproach.

No simple technical trick enables us to make an easy choice between these two views or others. Once the link between history writing and the human condition is grasped in all its complexity, simple solutions vanish. Aware of that, I have endeavored to trace the complex story of history writing in a manner that will enlighten readers but will not satisfy the lovers of simplifications. Just as history as a human endeavor has persisted and will persist, despite contemporary doubts and criticisms, because it has rejected arid theoretical schemes and has remained sensitive to the complexity and the creativity of life, so the study of historiography is most fascinating and worthwhile if it is not reduced to catch-words and formulas but is studied in its fullness. Only then can it inform us about the career of history throughout Western history and its service to human life.

1

The Emergence of Greek Historiography

The Timeless Past of Gods and Heroes

We and the bards. The Homeric epics, now innocuously enshrined in the treasure house we call Great Literature, were in centuries past sources of inspiration and pride. The ancient Greeks found them endlessly fascinating, edifying, and particularly useful for the education of the young. The Romans traced their origin to the Trojans, and so did other people in their quest for prestige. As late as four hundred years ago, some English and French scholars pointed with pride to their peoples’ Trojan lineage.

Yet for us today Homer’s magnificent Troy (most likely Troy VIla, destroyed around 1240 or 1230 B.C.) was just a town favorably situated at the entrance to the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles) whose inhabitants had become moderately prosperous through trade, levying tolls, textile manufacturing, and horse breeding. Its conquerors were a motley lot of Mycenaean nobles bent on destroying and looting. The Trojan campaign may have been the last hurrah of the Mycenaeans (or Achaeans) who, between 1600 and 1200 B.C., had dominated the Aegean area as sharp traders and even keener warriors. Soon after the Trojan War the Dorians moved into the Aegean area, shattered the Achaean world and ushered in the Greek Dark Age.

Four to five hundred years after Troy had been laid waste, Homer (or, as some scholars would have it, a number of rhapsodes or bards) composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, either by creating through artistic imagination new epics from traditional material or by simply coordinating a few existing epics. More troubling to the historian is the fact that the surviving versions of the two epics which so greatly influenced Western civilization were, of course, those versions somebody wrote down. Yet, the first of these appeared only during the sixth century B.C. in Athens, about two centuries after the emergence of the epics. The most influential version was that by Aristarchus of Samothrace from the second century B.C., in which the Mycenaean or Achaean, the Dorian Homeric, and the post-Homeric elements were already intermingled. Gradually and still dimly, the modern image of the Mycenaean period and the Greek Dark Age is taking shape. Its elements are trade relationships, empires, expeditions of plunder and destruction, strategies of war and trade, and intricate social hierarchies: conceptual schemes which would puzzle the bards of the Homeric period. These differences between the early Greek and the modern views of the past are not the result of mere communication problems. The bards and we do not agree on such fundamental issues as how one knows about the past, which forces shape events, and what is the purpose of historical accounts. Two different experiences of the world confront each other.

Language, gods, and heroes. As bards sang of gods, heroes, deeds, suffering, and glories, they created a characteristic appreciation of the past: the heroic epic. It could contain humor or stories about mundane life, even some irreverent passages, but in essence it spoke of life in the grand and noble manner and of gods. Hence the language of the epics was not that of the daily routine or of the marketplace. The bards recited the tales of the past in a lofty manner using a rhythmic speech, which alternated long and short syllables according to strict patterns. In the case of the Homeric epics, which were the heirs of many song traditions, the hexameter added to the solemnity with which heroic history was recited and listened to. It all enhanced the reverence in which listeners held the epics as the records of the distant past and the respect they gave the bards as the teachers about the past. The latter were able to maintain a seemingly unbroken epic tradition by the process of adaptation. In the absence of an authoritative written text, the bards could adjust their messages to the changing preferences and realities of collective life.

The Iliad is aristocratic history. Merchants, craftsmen, and peasants play little part in the actions. It fitted aristocratic tastes that there was not a chronological narrative of a war lasting ten years but a dramatic account of a few weeks; by implication the rest of the siege was uninteresting, dull, and of no importance, and it appears only in some explanatory flashbacks. The campaign which moved men and ships in great numbers became the background for the actions of gods and the deeds, passions, glories, and defeats of a few heroes. Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation…, begins the Iliad, and it keeps to that theme.¹Exceptions are few, the foremost being the undramatic catalogue of Achaean allies and ships. While that list delights the modern historians, since it describes the Mycenaean coalition which waged the war against Troy, it retards the action and lessens the excitement. Those who loved to listen to the Iliad were much more enamored by the dramatic core of the epic, the story of Achilles—his courage, strength, moral code, excessive passion, and doom; the related deeds of other heroes; the sufferings of noble women; and the machinations of gods and goddesses.

Does Homer in his Iliad ever venture beyond the aristocratic world and refer to the broader human life and its order? On occasions he says the will of Zeus was accomplished.²But Zeus was far from being the author of all human events, and he was not even the initiator of the Trojan War; it had what must appear to moderns a frivolous base: the vengeance taken by Athena and Hera on the Troy of Paris, who had judged their beauty to be less than Aphrodite’s. In return, Aphrodite had seen to it that Paris could carry off the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Menelaus, Helen’s husband, became the instrument of vengeance. Other gods and goddesses interfered in the war according to their preferences by participating actively in battles, directing and deflecting weapons, scheming against others, persuading Zeus, influencing mortals, or quarreling among themselves. The gods shared influence with the heroes whose fighting, winning, wounding, and dying fill epic history. Indeed, heroic history shrank the world and time to the world of the hero who struggled, inspired by an unchanging code of honor, guided by often excessive passions, hindered and helped by gods and goddesses, and finally met death as the noble end to a triumphant life.

Disdain for the unheroic. Heroic history paid little heed to the collective human fate. The Iliad remained silent on the siege, even on the destruction of Troy and was followed by a personal adventure story, the Odyssey, as if the fate of the Achaeans did not matter. Only that part of the Achaean past was important which was ennobled by the presence of extraordinary persons, the heroes who still mingled with the gods. Since epic history clearly wished to inspire rather than to inform, events could remain timeless. What did it matter to those who imitated or admired the heroes when exactly the Trojan War had occurred?

Only the unheroic, the stuff of everyday life, is under the yoke of continuous time. Homer knew of the flow of unheroic life: the sun rises and sets; people are born, grow up, age, and die; and winter yields to spring and summer. He was aware of the fate of the many—their joys and sorrows, their institutions and possessions—but he rarely recorded it. No bard would recite to aristocratic audiences events lacking heroism, or tell the people at religious festivals and public gatherings about things which reminded them of their own daily toil. The audiences came to be inspired, excited, and in the best sense entertained. Neither they nor the bards had any notion that events, big and small, when told in proper time sequence, would result in an explanatory narrative. The past showed only heroic deeds performed in connection with isolated great events, and the future could be foretold only by oracles and portents. The idea that the events of the past could influence those of the present was far from the minds of the bards and their audiences. They recognized only the continuity of timeless ideals and virtues which the heroes of the past taught to the people of the present. Hence the persistence of heroic history throughout centuries when life no longer resembled that in archaic Greece. In the fourth century Homer’s influence was still so strong that Plato regretted the poet’s hold on Hellenic education and his power over individuals.

The didactic use of the Iliad was not defeated—even if the stunning dramatic unity of the work was weakened—when its story was spun out into a quasi-continuous account, which elaborated on and added stories to the Homeric epics. The authors of the subsidiary epics filled in what they considered to be missing links in the Iliad: an elaborate story centering around the rape of Helen, the tale of the Trojan horse, the Laocoön story, and the return of the heroes from Troy.

Discovering a Past of Human Dimensions

Hesiod and the collective human fate. Notwithstanding the enduring enthusiasm for Homer, the dominance of heroic history could not last. An approximate contemporary of Homer, Hesiod of Ascra, already suggested a different view of the past. His Theogony (700s B.C.)showed a greater sense of abstract order as the cosmos emerged from chaos and sketchy genealogies of gods and goddesses were established. Most remarkably, Hesiod affirmed a collective human past and divided it into five ages (races): the Golden Age, in which people lived like gods, without care, suffering, and chores, and in which they died peacefully without aging; the Silver Age, when life was marked by utmost cruelty and unbridled love of war, and people revolted against all things divine and met an early death; the Age of Bronze, which was peopled by a race of extraordinary physical strength and vigor that destroyed itself by incessant warfare; the Age of Heroes (not identified with any metal), filled with noble humans and half-gods, who, unfortunately, also destroyed themselves in wars, one of them being Homer’s Trojan War; and the Iron Age, the time of Hesiod and common man, which offered little but misery, injustice, a general lack of benevolence, aging, and death.

The past had acquired not only something akin to continuity but also a direction. The assertion that human history is the story of a decline from a Golden Age would reverberate throughout Western historiography, although other forces would be blamed for it than the will of Zeus.

New views on the world and time. After 800 B.C. the Greek world changed remarkably with the emergence of the polis, that is the city-state with an urban center and a contiguous rural district. These states, of widely varying sizes, types of government, and degrees of cultural development, were closely knit, self-governing communities marked by a keen and creative tension between their assertion of the individual’s autonomy and their demand for conformity to the order of law and custom. During its best years the polis provided a context for Greek life that released a wave of human energy. One of its significant manifestations was the colonization movement, and soon the Greeks sat on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea like frogs around a pond. When these Greek colonists, particularly those on the coast of Asia Minor, confronted other cultures with different sets of customs and beliefs, they were reminded of their identity as Hellenes. Although the Greek sense of superiority limited cultural assimilation, the awareness of a wider and diverse world did affect Greek thought. It assisted substantially in bringing about changes in poetry, art, and thought, with philosophy receiving most attention.

The intellectual revolution began in the sixth century B.C. with Thales of Miletus and was continued by other philosophers. Under its impact the cosmos lost its anthropomorphic structure. Instead, philosophers searched for the basic substances from which all known objects were made up and for the processes which transformed these substances into the great variety of things. Yet all of these early philosophers explored the mystery of the cosmos rather than the problems of human existence. Only in the fourth century did the Sophists turn their attention to the phenomena connected with human life. But the changes in Greek life, of which the intellectual revolution was an important aspect, soon affected Greek views on the past.

As the Greeks, especially the Ionians, grew more confident in the practical and intellectual mastery of the world, they launched a broad inquiry into the geography and the peoples of the oikoumenē. or historia), altered Greek views on the two basic dimensions of all of life, space, and time. From Greek explorations of the coastal areas of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Middle East, and even a bit of the Atlantic coast, came new descriptions of wide parts of the contemporary world, particularly Hecataeus of Miletus’s Periegesis (meaning approximately journey round the world). His work and that of other pioneers made ‘known, described, and rationally organized the terrestrial space known to the Greeks.

The same zeal for exploration and rational organization soon transformed the Greek view of the dimension of time. The world of geographers and the cosmos of philosophers were continuous, while heroic history was by its nature discontinuous. Homer’s heroes had lived at an indeterminate point in the past and were connected with the present solely through the inspirations and lessons derived from the heroes and their deeds. There were no dates in the Iliad. Homer neither had a time frame available in which to place the Trojan War, nor would it have mattered to him to know the dates. Since the heroic epic had no use for the continuity of time, it made little difference to Homer that year followed year. Glaucus mirrored the Homeric attitude when he told Diomedes: As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again when the season of spring is returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies .³

Eventually some Greeks would use the very concept of generations, those layers of human life, as a first step towards building a continuous account of the past. But in the Iliad the passage of generations merely points out the unimportance, even futility of routine human life.

Around 500 B.C., the Greeks began to grope towards the concept of continuous time and with it a history in which an unbroken line of years filled with events would stretch from the present into the most distant past. The timeless gods did not decree that view nor did the heroes need it, whose deeds surpassed all time, but the dwellers of the polis had use for it as they began to shape their lives. Life in the polis consisted not of isolated episodes in heroic lives but relied on the continuity of institutions, rules, laws, contracts, and expectations.

The chronological control of the past. Hecataeus of Miletus, who strained so hard to shape the geography of his world according to rational concepts, also dealt with the problem of time in his Genealogies" Fragmentary remains indicate that he attempted to link the age of humans with the so far timeless mythical age by constructing an unbroken sequence of identified generations for that long interval. The habit of looking for illustrious ancestors of cities, peoples, or families in the dim period of heroes and gods had established that link to the distant past which Hecataeus now wished to organize in human terms.

In the fifth century B.C. the Lydian Xanthus recorded the past of his people up to the downfall of their King Croesus. It is remarkable that he already attempted to relate the human events of the past, mythical and otherwise, to memorable and potentially datable natural events such as earthquakes and droughts. Later in the century, Hellanicus of Lesbos used a generation count as a chronological tool in his Troica and, based on it, placed the fall of Troy in the year equivalent to about 1240 B.C. In his Attic History Hellanicus proceeded beyond a mere generation count and, Thucydides’ subsequent criticism notwithstanding, proposed a new tool for dating events: lists of officeholders kept by cities and temples. He himself used the list of the priestesses of Hera at Argos and in another work the list of winners of the Carnean games. Using the Argos list, Hellanicus tried valiantly to sort into chronological order a multitude of events—Greek, Sicilian, Roman (including the founding of Rome).

Hellanicus’s idea led to other lists: those of Olympic victors (Hippias of EUs), of the ephors in Sparta (beginning with 755 B.C.), and of archons in Athens (since 683/82 B.C.). But how could one fit together all these separate records of ephors, archons, priests, priestesses, and games so that they formed one time frame? This question was not answered for a long time. When it was, the answers originated less in intellectual contemplation than in practical needs. A uniform time-scale for all Greeks was not yet a practical necessity for the fragmented world of city-states. Hence even Hellanicus’s two famous contemporaries, Herodotus of Halicarnassus and Thucydides, remained traditional in chronology.

Herodotus, whose wide-ranging account would have had the greater need for a chronology, simply improvised. Perceiving no unifying tie between the histories of the Lydians, Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks, he gave them no proper chronological cohesion. Each segment had its own chronological structure. His occasional attempts to coordinate Greek and oriental time schemes failed, most notably his experiment with the Egyptian dynastic lists. The stretches of plotless ethnographic and geographic descriptions in his Histories called for no consistent time frame, and in the narrative sections he let the logic of stories suggest the sequence in time. Only from the Ionian revolt on did Herodotus’s chronology become more systematic.

In this as in most respects, Thucydides was more systematic. He displayed both the achievements and limitations of contemporary Greek chronology when he dated the beginning of the Peloponnesian War:

For fourteen years, the thirty years’ peace which was concluded after the recovery of Euboea remained unbroken. But in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis the high priestess of Argos was in the forty-eighth year of her priest-hood, Zenesias was ephor of Sparta, and Pythodorus had four months of his archonship to run at Athens, in the tenth month after the engagement at Potidaea at the beginning of spring, about the first watch of the night, an armed force of somewhat more than three hundred Thebans entered Plataea, a city of Boeotia, which was an ally of Athens.⁴

Yet, after he had located the start of the war in time, Thucydides had no more recourse to the lists of officeholders. From then on he simply counted the summers and winters which had elapsed. The story of the war built its own time frame.

2

The Era of the Polis and Its Historians

The New History of the Polis

The old ioropia faded slowly. While in Herodotus’s Histories the accent eventually came to rest on the Great Persian War, ethnographic and geographic elements were still prominent. Herodotus delighted in telling about the origins and customs of people, towns, regions, constitutions, politics, and about curiosa in Egypt, Arabia and India, Scythia, Libya, and Thrace. These descriptive parts of his work were no mere digressions, satisfying human curiosity about strange people and places, but substantial inquiries, constituting a wide-ranging cultural history. Scholars have argued heatedly over whether Herodotus’s Histories could be considered a unitary work. However, for demonstrating the eventual claim the polis laid on Greek historiography, it suffices that the Great Persian War established a unity between the books on the Persians and Greeks. Subsequently, Greek reflection on the past would focus on the fate of states and thus narrow the scope of the old urropia considerably. Thucydides’ work was to be the most significant result of that trend.

War as the critical collective experience. The Trojan War had been the grand stage of life for heroic history. Within its framework the heroes lived and died and, to a lesser extent, the Achaeans as a people showed their brilliance and failings. In the works of Herodotus and Thucydides the Trojan War was ousted from its preeminent place by two more recent momentous wars. Herodotus became the historian of the period of Greek victory and glory when he narrated the Great Persian War while Thucydides was the historian of the period of Greek self-destruction, through his narration and analysis of the Peloponnesian War.

In these accounts, much more changed than the names of battles and heroes. Unlike Homer’s Trojan War, which had been the business of noble heroes, the wars reported on by Herodotus and Thucydides were collective experiences of commoners. Their description was less well served by poetic genius and inspiration than by prose skills and analysis. After all, the Trojan War had occurred in the distant and misty age of gods and heroes while the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars were recent experiences involving people whom one could still meet in the marketplace or at the court of Persia. About a war seen as a general human experience one also could ask questions of Why? What? When? and Where? and expect answers primarily in terms of human motives and actions. Also, with the reflection on the past so clearly focused, the study of the past was no longer submerged in a broadly conceived inquiry, the old urropia, but acquired a clear and separate identity: the study of human experience through the analysis of the past.

Herodotus and Thucydides differed not only in the wars they dealt with but also in their approaches. Herodotus, who developed elements of the old urtopia to perfection, concluded his account with the story of the Great Persian War (in 490 and 480/79). Thus his broad cultural history ended with a celebration of the Greek city-states, especially Athens. Not so Thucydides, whose aim in writing history differed radically from that of Herodotus although much else about him and his work is not clear: why he described the Peloponnesian War only up to 411 B.C., well before it ended; when he wrote his history; when he died; and whether or not he really understood that the series of campaigns he described constituted just one Peloponnesian War. Whatever definitive answers scholars will eventually give to these questions, nobody can doubt the unitary character of Thucydides’s history, which set a dramatic account against the broad Herodotean cultural history. Only five segments seem to digress from the main story of the war and even they function as further explanation of the war or of Thucydides’ method of work. Throughout his work Thucydides relentlessly pursued contemporary history; that meant the exposition and exploration of the Peloponnesian War. Why should one bother with anything prior to it, since former ages were not great either in their wars nor in anything else?¹

Both historians wrote about war not in order to glorify it but because they perceived it as an essential force in the shaping of Greek destiny. Herodotus viewed the Great Persian Wars as the grand battle between the forces of despotism and freedom, between Orient and Occident, and between a despotic monarchy and city-states governed by their citizens. Lest anybody equate that battle with a simple struggle between good and evil, Herodotus pointedly reminded his readers or listeners of the many admirable customs of the Persians, the fickleness of the masses in a democracy, and the contrast between the serene unity of the Persian Empire and the strident discord among Greek city-states. Such understanding for the barbarians, that is, non-Greek-speaking people, testified to a remarkable cosmopolitanism, which many Greeks found unacceptable and forgave only because Herodotus glorified the Greek cause in the Persian War.

Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War as one who saw the power and glory of Athens first reduced and then subjected to the misery of defeat; a development so grand that it spurred him on to lay bare the forces, stresses, decisions, strategies, policies, and passions involved in war. The Peloponnesian War thus deserved a record not only because it was a crucial event in Greek experience but also because as a great war it revealed most clearly the essential and unalterable patterns which structure political events. Searching for these patterns, Thucydides found wars to be only partially controlled by human will. When Sparta and Athens collided it seemed to be solely the result of conscious decisions made freely by the two parties, but actually strong impulses toward war originated in the very structure of the political situation: Sparta and Athens had a basic conflict of interests. These interests in turn originated in the relentless human drive for power which is the central force in human events.

The gods fall silent. In Homer’s epics gods and goddesses participated lustily in the affairs of mortals. Hecataeus and other early historians did not dispute these tales in their search for the genealogies of gods and heroes. But the spirit in which they approached the traditional stories was already less one of reverence and more one of detached observation. These men did not doubt the gods and heroes but they trimmed the mythical and epic traditions to the dimensions of human life. Hecataeus expressed the spirit well in his Genealogies: I wrote about that in the way it seems to me to be true; because what the Greeks tell about it [the mythological tradition] varies quite a bit and is, it appears to me, laughable .²

Gods and goddesses retained a prominent position in Herodotus’s work, but he spoke of the still important intervention of gods and goddesses on fewer occasions and in subtler ways. Arrogance, excessive pride, blind enjoyment of riches, seemingly endless successes—they all evoked the angry jealousy of the gods. My lord, replied Solon to a question posed by Croesus, I know God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us; and you question me about the lot of man!³ In a similar vein Artanabus warns Xerxes not to wage war: You know, my lord, that amongst living creatures it is the great ones that God smites with his thunder, out of envy of their pride. The little ones do not vex him. It is always the great buildings and the tall trees which are struck by lightning. It is God’s way to bring the lofty low.⁴ Aside from such occasional episodes of wrath, the gods fell silent in Herodotus’s account. This ambiguity expressed Herodotus’s puzzlement about the exact linkage between human decision, human fate, and divine verdicts. He ended up seeing human beings as shaping their lives, with human weaknesses now causing the doom which gods formerly pronounced and human greatness yielding the triumphs which gods used to grant. Only if human beings were relatively free of divine influence could history become the history of persons and their deeds which Herodotus tried to write.

According to Thucydides the gods never directly influenced the course of human events. He granted that those persons who shape human destinies are often guided by a belief in gods, oracles, or divinations, although he did not approve of such guidance. On occasion, however, even Thucydides appeared to waver. When at the outset of his account he pronounced the Peloponnesian War to be one of the great wars, he cited severe earthquakes, droughts causing famines, the plague, and eclipses of the sun as its portents. Yet, in his further analysis he had no use for such phenomena. His interpretation of war and empire relied on forces which originated in the structure of human life. Passions, miscalculations, and overreaching ambitions doom humans and their accomplishments. Of gods, Thucydides felt, he need not speak.

Forces and causes. Changing perceptions of the past are particularly apparent in the causes Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides gave for the wars they described. According to Homer, the Trojan War stemmed from Paris’s foolish judgment and Hera’s and Athena’s desires for vengeance. In Herodotus’s account of the Persian Wars the forces pushing toward war were an odd lot: mischief-making exiles at the Persian court who urged Xerxes to wage war against the Greeks; fraudulent oracles; a peculiar sense of duty which told Xerxes that he must add to Persia’s power; the hope for booty and for control of Greek wealth; and, of course, revenge for Athens’ support of the Ionian revolt against Persian rule. But above all there was in Xerxes that burning if somewhat vague ambition that the sun will not look down upon any land beyond the boundaries of what is ours.⁵ In the end that grandiose ambition also provoked the Persian catastrophe by arousing the gods, who frowned upon excessive power. Essentially, Herodotus’s list of reasons for the war is a list of human motives.

Thucydides found Herodotus’s explanation insufficient. He introduced the remarkable distinction between the triggering incident, in this case the intervention of Sparta and Athens in the quarrel between Corinth and Corcyra over Epidamnus, and the underlying cause which, though it was least avowed, I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacadaemonians and put them under the necessity of fighting.⁶ The Peloponnesian War resulted not from the capricious wishes of gods or kings, or from misguided human passions, but from the ceaseless human quest for power. Thus, when Athens gradually transformed the once voluntary alliance of city-states against Persia into an Athenian empire, she harvested the enmity of some of those subjugated and of her competitor, Sparta. The Athenians, on their part, were driven to imperialism by the basic human obsession with dominating others and were encouraged in it by the inertia of her allies, who preferred paying tribute to the rigors of preparing for and going to war.

Once the wars were underway, Homer and Herodotus treated them as dramas of colliding passions. Thucydides, however, pointed out the links between wars and the forces structuring collective human life, in his analysis of how power, once gained, influenced the destiny of a state. Although the Athenians, who had chosen the strenuous life, deserved to rule others, they soon discovered that an established empire cannot be abandoned at will since, if they were to do so, they would destroy their new way of life. Therefore, as time went on, the empire changed its immediate motive for existence: it dominated others first out of fear, then for honor, and lastly for profit. In such a process,justice, which can only exist between equals, is lost when the powerful exact what they can and the weak grant what they must.⁷

The Athenian hegemony collapsed when the weaknesses of the Athenian state, which in times of peace had only been irksome, became fatal under the stress of war. Early in the war the plague, a chance misfortune, hit Athens and caused many Athenians to lose all hope for the future. As people began to live strictly for the present,the hold of tradition weakened. Norms, restraints, and moderation, all of which presuppose confidence in the continuity of life, lost their shaping power, and the social fabric began to tear in places. As social cohesion loosened, the stresses of war became even more burdensome. The war, which was begun to solve Athens’ problems, showed a tendency to amplify risks, breed misfortune, punish miscalculations, evoke acts of violence against internal opponents, and erode the basis of the very society which was to profit from it. Brutal oppression of people, such as the massacre of the Melians, evoked fierce counterforces. Reverses in battles prepared the political arena for the entrance of the demagogue, particularly Thucydides’ bete noire, Cleon. Thucydides, distrusting the clever oratory in the popular assembly, saw a frustrated populace gullibly following those orators who promised solutions which at first sight were pleasant but eventually disastrous. Both the lessons of the past and long-range projection into the future were sacrificed for the quick alleviation of what was felt to be burdensome. Such action proved easy, since neither the populace nor the demagogues ever needed to take responsibility for consequences that were unwanted.

Thucydides traced the fate of the Athenian state in a splendid narrative that at the same time was analytical history. He saw no contradiction between the two. After all, life itself demonstrated the coexistence of the particular event (the subject of the narrative) and the general patterns (the focus of analysis). Thucydides explored the complex interrelationship between these two aspects of life when he described the role of the individual. He stressed the destructive influence of the demagogue and placed an even stronger emphasis on the positive role of the statesman. The latter’s hold on the masses endowed his wise counsel with effectiveness, and he could thereby maintain the always precarious proper order in the state and, thus, secure its existence. But Thucydides did not answer the intriguing question whether Athens would have suffered utter defeat had the plague not taken Pericles away. Could a brilliant statesman enable a state to defy the larger forces at work in politics? Thucydides gave no clear answer as to the relative strength of the individual and these larger forces structuring human life. For him the tension between the two simply formed a constituent part of human life.

New style and old purpose. The Homeric epics and to a lesser extent Hesiod’s work could be recited and listened to with pleasure. But Hecataeus and other early historians already conveyed their messages in Greek prose. Interestingly, the change from poetry to prose occurred together with the change in the attitude toward the past. Prose would not have served the heroic history of Homer and the bards but it did work in the undramatic sorting and cataloguing of gods and heroes and in the construction of genealogies.

Freed from the restraint of meter but also lacking the power which rhyme had given to language, Herodotus had to rely on human curiosity and on the internal tensions of stories for captivating his audiences. Nevertheless his prose was pleasing enough to be recited successfully, a feature of great value in a period with a still strong oral tradition. Curiously, it was Thucydides, disclaiming any concern with pleasing the audience and wishing his work to reflect a lack of romance, who developed the most expressive and precise prose style. His relentless search for the essence of history, rather than for the merely interesting detail, found its stylistic counterpart in a sparse, rhythmic prose which had an impact on his audience like that of poetry. This magnificent unity of style and content captivated listeners and readers—the criticism and disdain of later rhetoricians notwithstanding.

Modern praise of Thucydides’ work, however, has never included his use of thirty to forty speeches in the History of the Peloponnesian War. Homer and Herodotus had used speeches in their works, but Thucydides had labeled the first an unreliable poet and rejected the type of history the second had produced. How then did he justify the use of speeches which obviously were not accurate records of what was said?

As for the speeches made on the eve of the war or during the course, it was hard for me, when I heard them myself, and for any others who reported them to me to recollect exactly what had been said. I have therefore put into the mouth of each speaker the views that, in my opinion, they would have been most likely to express, as the particular occasions demanded, while keeping as nearly as I could to the general purport of what was actually said.⁸

He also could have stated that speeches set the stage, described situations, and told about motivations without recourse to long enumerations and the use of abstractions. They read well and sounded even better in recitations. They also came closer to the ideal of truth whenever they contained parts of actual speeches, as in the case of Pericles’ so-called Funeral Oration. In other words, the speeches of Thucydides contained what was said, could have been said, or should have been said. Indeed, speeches became so useful a narrative device that historians abandoned their use only a few centuries ago.

Writing in a manner that would produce the desired effect on the public mattered greatly to Greek historians, who, beginning with Homer, never lost sight of the public purpose of historical knowledge: history as the story of the past must above all inspire and teach (occasionally, it may entertain). The Iliad told people about the heroic age, its gods and heroes, extolling the worthiness of noble and proper conduct. Those early historians who practiced ioropia as a general inquiry, research, fact gathering, and reconnaissance, also had their public purpose: to build a new tradition free of fictional parts and to link the heroic age with the contemporary period.

Herodotus proclaimed the public purpose of his Histories at the very outset. He hoped to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of the Asiatic peoples.⁹ Then he proceeded to inspire, inform and—incidentally—entertain. Herodotus fulfilled his intentions by relating stories which taught the proper moderation, by telling of the many ways of human life, and by directing the attention of individuals to the great issues of the past. For his broad approach to recounting the past Herodotus has not only been called the father of history by later generations but has also been credited with the creation of a specific type of history: cultural history.

Thucydides taught the Greeks, at the same time, less and more. He led Greek history away from the broad inquiry into earlier times and the lives of other peoples to a concentration on the much smaller world of the polis and the contemporary period. Having limited his field of study in terms of periods and areas covered, Thucydides analyzed and described the field thoroughly in his search for’ those general forces which shaped the fate of states. In its analysis and purpose Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War resembles his report on the plague epidemic in Athens, in which he carefully described all symptoms of the disease in order to enable medical experts to cope with future outbreaks of the plague. Those